computers

What We Can Learn from the Paris Attacks (Without Ignoring the Elephant in the Room)
Yep, this is more or less what I think.
(tags: paris terrorism islam islamism religion politics)
What is emotional labor?
A term that once described jobs where being friendly and cheerful was seen as part of the job has apparently been co-opted to mean “someone expects me to do something”.
(tags: emotion labour work relationships)
Guide to software developer job advertisements: andrewducker
Seems legit.
(tags: software software-engineering jobs adverts careers)
My first 10 day Vipassana retreat
Not *my* retreat. Some bloke’s. It’s an interesting article about the experience though.
(tags: meditation buddhism mindfulness retreat)
An alias for when you really need it done…
I’m totally setting this up.
(tags: funny computers unix sudo)
The Deadlock Empire
A nice little web game where you try to break a threaded program by executing a critical section in two threads at once. It’s pretty neat.
(tags: programming threads concurrency locks game)

Stewart Lee: The Imaginary Liberal Comedy Cabal will crush the Ukips into dust | Stage | The Guardian
There is now a cabal.
(tags: ukip stewart-lee comedy humour funny politics cabal)
The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing
Emulation of old computers and grief over the death of a friend who used them. Via Mefi.
(tags: emulation technology grief nostalgia)
When Women Stopped Coding : Planet Money : NPR
I remember seeing a photo of an old-ish computer surrounded by its programming team in the computing museum at Bletchley Park. Most of the team were women. This blog/podcast looks at what happened in the USA.
(tags: women coding computers feminism sexism technology)
Loyalty and Layoffs | Heart, Mind and Code
The corporation is not your friend.
(tags: employment loyalty career redundancy layoffs)
Loyalty and Trust | Heart, Mind and Code
A more temperate follow up to the “don’t be loyal to the corporation” one, distinguishing loyalty, trust and vulnerability.
(tags: employment layoffs trust vulnerability work loyalty)

BBC News – Leaked letter shows ISPs and government at war
Dave wants a scheme were people uncheck a box to get pr0n described as "default on" filtering, allowing him to claim victory without the ISPs changing what they’re doing.
(tags: politics pornograpy porn censorship internet david-cameron)
David Cameron’s crusade against images of child abuse has a whiff of politics – Editorials – Voices – The Independent
What is Dave up to? The Independent identifies it as a clever bit of politics.
(tags: pornography politics porn censorship internet david-cameron)
12 Silly Things People Believe About Computers | Terminally Incoherent
(tags: computers it support funny)
Victory Lap for Ask Patents – Joel on Software
"There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent from being approved. Got fifteen minutes? You can do it too."
(tags: prior-art software patents)

Why The Daily Mail is Evil (at The @PodDelusion’s 3rd birthday do) by Martin Robbins – YouTube
Yes, it’s doing the rounds, but it’s still good.
(tags: paper mail journalism daily-mail newspaper)
The SCP Foundation
Descriptions of strange and horrifying objects being held by a secret organisation. If you liked Stross’s Laundry stuff, you might like this. Time sink warning, there are lots of them. Looks like it’s a collaboration using a wiki.
(tags: lovecraft sci-fi wiki science-fiction horror)
Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks
Lovecraftian Windows 95 dialogs: “It’s never safe to turn off your computer.”
(tags: computers horror lovecraft win95 funny windows)
Is Irish Law to blame for the death of Savita?
“In December 2010, the Irish government was told by the European Court of Human Rights to deal with exactly this kind of situation, either by making legislative changes or by issuing clear guidelines which acted to remove any and all ambiguities surround the question of when doctors are required to carry out terminations in order to save women’s lives.

To date, it has done nothing, largely, it seems, because Ireland’s anti-abortion lobby, and the Roman Catholic Church (naturally) have spent the last two years or so trying to shout down any notion that an abortion may be necessary to save a woman’s life in any circumstances.

What this sad case proves, definitively, is that they are lying and the real tragedy here is not just that a woman has died because they were lying but that woman has had to die, unnecessarily and in excruciating pain, to prove them wrong.”
(tags: medicine religion catholicism ireland law abortion)
Pelican Development Blog
Pelican is a Python static blog generator which works with Markdown. Looks nice. There’s also Calepin.co, which is a service that’ll publish your blog if you stick it in your Dropbox. Will I finally leave LJ? Maybe…
(tags: markdown software blog python)

Git Immersion – Brought to you by EdgeCase

Looks like a nice introduction to the "git" version control system. Must get round to understanding that one of these days.
(tags: programming version-control git development tutorial software tools)

I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right – Telegraph

In the Torygraph of all places.
(tags: politics economics journalism murdoch news telegraph)

philosophy bites: Nick Bostrom on the Simulation Argument

"Nick Bostrom doesn't rule out the possibility that he might be part of a computer simulation. Find out why in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast." Hard to fault the argument, as far as I can tell, though I should probably check how people have responded to it.
(tags: philosophy computers consciousness simulation nick-bostrom transhumanism)

fic: the joinery (game of thrones) (1/2)

A nice alternate history of A Game of Thrones from Cersei's perspective: what would have happened if Ned had taken the throne instead of Robert? Spoilers for the first book/TV series.
(tags: fandom fanfic game-of-thrones books cersei/ned)

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m thinking of getting one those shiny smartphone things. Looking at the iPhone, Google Nexus 1 and HTC Desire.

I like the idea of the dual microphone noise cancellation and the voice activation on the N1. The Desire has some sort of funky social networking stuff and a prettier UI that the N1, although there was some muttering on various web forums about HTC being slow at releasing updates (and you don’t get the noise cancellation or voice activation).

scribb1e has an iPhone and likes it. I’ve got a Mac, so everything will probably Just Work. That said, I’m loath to pay them money as they’re so tight-fisted about application development, but I’m probably kidding myself when I imagine that I might write something for an Android phone anyway.

Discuss…

A Turing Machine Overview

Someone has built this excellent mechanical Turing machine (OK, so it has electronics in the read/write head, but it's got real tape).
(tags: computers hardware programming software turing video algorithm history logic compsci)

YouTube – The Daily Mail Song

Shooting fish in a barrel,but still funny.
(tags: video music youtube funny satire humour mail news newspapers daily-mail dan)

The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School :: Worshipping a Flying Teapot? What to Do When Christianity Looks Ridiculous by Randal Rauser

"Restoring Christianity's place as a live intellectual option requires not simply superior rational argumentation, but the restoration of a background framework in which Christian claims seem minimally plausible." One of the few worthwhile articles in The Other Journal's edition on atheism (the others being either Vogon poetry or articles about that nasty Dawkins fellow).
(tags: religion christianity atheism teapot)

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World | February 2010 | Communications of the ACM

Bunch of academics write a static checker and take it commercial. They are surprised to find that: Compilers for embedded targets accept stuff which isn't quite C, embedded programmers use the stuff, because we're evil. A worryingly large proportion of programmers are clueless ("No, ANSI lets you write 1 past the end of the array"), concluding that "You cannot often argue with people who are sufficiently confused about technical matters; they think you are the one who doesn't get it. They also tend to get emotional. Arguing reliably kills sales." Also, managers like graphs of bad stuff to go down over time, so don't like the tool to improve. Fun article. Via Metafilter.
(tags: programming analysis security software coverity development tools C)

A review of ‘The language of God’ (Francis Collins)

Gert Korthof likes Collins's stuff on evolution, but thinks the Moral Law argument (which Collins acknowledges he got from C.S. Lewis) is terrible: "Collins fails to demonstrate

a. the failure of Darwinism to explain the Moral Law (true altruism)
b. the divine origin of the Moral Law
c. b follows from a "
(tags: creation evolution morality religion science francis-collins c.s.-lewis altruism)

“I WANT TO TAKE GOOGLES OFF OF MY HOME PAGE” | MetaFilter

What happens when your blog becomes one of the top Google results for "login to Facebook". Take it either as a serious lesson about user interface design, or an opportunity to mock the stupid.
(tags: facebook login funny internet computers ui user-interface browser google)

Meat stylus for the iPhone

I got yer meat stylus right here, baby.
(tags: iphone culture funny meat)

Simon Blackburn (2) – Religion and Respect – Investigating Atheism

Blackburn's interesting and slightly cheeky ("Even Christians are human") article on what it might mean to respect someone's religion. He thinks there might be something in respecting emotions but not attitudes, and bemoans religious appropriation of the sacred. Contains quote from Hume which is another example of the way Hume seems to have had everyone's ideas before they did (this time on belief in belief).
(tags: religion respect simon-blackburn philosophy hume)

Why reject miracles? (Irrational Rationalist)

An attempt at formulating the argument in a way which doesn't beg the question, and some talk about what Hume actually meant.
(tags: hume miracles philosophy religion rationality)

Is there anything wrong with “God of the gaps” reasoning? by Robert Larmer

Larmer argues that both theists and atheists shouldn't be so hard on "God of the Gaps" explanations (the phrase originated as a criticism of Christians by Christians). While it's certainly true that it's not a formal fallacy, I think what makes me uneasy about such explanations is the ease with which "the thing which explains X" is identified with "the Christian God" (say). But I'll have to think about it some more.
(tags: theology philosophy naturalism science religion god gaps larmer robert-larmer)